Arts & Culture | Music

When Inna Barmash sings a Yiddish lullaby during her show next week at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, it won’t be an entirely unusual experience. She is more used to singing those songs to a pair of young men in their pajamas, but having a larger audience that is fully dressed won’t phase her.

It is a bitter thing for an artist to suddenly descend from stardom to obscurity through no fault of his own. When Daoud al-Kuwaiti and his brother Salah were forced to leave Iraq for Israel in 1951, along with 120,000 other Iraqi Jews, they went from being musical giants honored by the royal court to being... grocers.

The Jews of Scotland were recently awarded an official tartan. Actually, “they have three now,” says Hanna Griff-Slevin, director of the family history center and cultural programs at the Museum at Eldridge Street.

Jews have long felt a special kinship with rocker Bruce Springsteen; his Jewish-sounding name, left-wing politics and his penchant for singing about the downtrodden have made Jewish mothers everywhere insist he’s one of the tribe.

The Fifth Beatle: The Brian Epstein Story chronicles in surrealist, comic-book-style fashion the rise and fall of one of the most successful music managers of all time. It is the untold tale of Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ Jewish, homosexual manager, who guided the group during their atmospheric rise to fame and whose vision changed the world. “If anyone was the fifth Beatle, it was Brian,” Paul McCartney famously stated in a 1999 BBC interview.

The noted clarinetist David Krakauer has moved through enough genres to last several musical lifetimes. In the past 25 years he has played everything from klezmer (where he was one of the leaders of the klez revival) to classical, jazz, folk and funk.